The Tanglewood Terror

by Kurtis Scaletta

  “Psst. Pig Boy! Want some help?”

  I wheeled around and saw Mandy.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I was using the computers at the library. I saw the guys playing football and wanted to see if you were there.”

  “I was, but I left early. I thought you had the whole Internet on your phone.”

  “Not really. The library has access to all kinds of stuff you can’t get at from any computer. Newspaper archives. Special collections at other libraries.”

  “Ooh … how exciting.” Ms. Weller would have loved her.

  “I found some interesting stuff, so there. Getting to a real library was half the reason I split in the first place.”

  “You weren’t worried about anyone seeing you?”

  “I didn’t talk to anyone. I just sneaked in and found a computer in the corner.”

  “I thought you needed a library card to log in.”

  “I have ways,” she said.

  I could see the players trotting off the field in the distance, Coach clapping his hands and yelling something. The groundskeeper was already at the far end of the field, giving the mushrooms a series of little blasts with his sprayer.

  “Hey!” said Mandy.

  “Huh!” I’d sort of zoned out.

  “I’ll buy a pizza if you get it,” said Mandy. “I have plenty of money, but my face is stapled to telephone poles all over town.”

  “All right. I could go for a pizza.” I struggled to get the backpack back on my shoulder—it had slid down to my elbow again.

  “Give me that,” said Mandy, taking the helmet.

  We walked toward downtown. Mandy turned up her collar to hide her face when we hit Keatston Street, and stayed so close behind me that she kept bumping me with my helmet. I called Dad from Mandy’s phone, but she made me use an app routed through something called a proxy so she wouldn’t show up on our caller ID. Dad picked up.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s me.”

  “How come the caller ID says you’re in Fresno?”

  “It’s been acting up lately. I’m calling from the … from Tom’s cell.”

  “Okay, ’cause I’d be really ticked if you went off to Cali without me. Hey, I went shopping! Got all kinds of stuff that isn’t made out of mammal.”

  “Great, thanks.”

  “I know you don’t eat pig, and I went veg in Boston. Of course it’s easy there, because there’s so many awesome restaurants.”

  “Well, I’m going for pizza with some of the guys tonight, Dad,” I cut in. Mandy and I were nearly in town. It was only a few minutes’ walk from the school.

  “Okay, cool beans. Talk to you later, bud.” He clicked off.

  Mandy took the phone and called her mom’s house, getting her little sister. They argued a bit before she hung up, but I guessed that she would tell her parents that Mandy was okay.

  “Little sisters,” she said. “They’re almost as bad as big sisters. You’re lucky you don’t have one.”

  “No, just a brother.” I didn’t remember talking siblings with her, but I must have. “He can be a pain too, but mostly he’s a cool little kid. You’d like him. He likes monsters.”

  “Then he’d love my little sister,” she said.

  I got a Papa’s pizza for takeout, which Mandy and I took to the empty pavilion at the park. We ate the pizza fast, since it was already getting cold. We’d settled on hamburger, since I didn’t want sausage and neither of us wanted mushrooms.

  “Oh, let me show you what I learned at the library.” She dug in her bag and pulled out a stack of paper, riffled through it, and handed me a page. It was too dark to make anything out, but she fiddled with her phone and turned it into a rectangle of brightness.

  “Flashlight app,” she said, handing me the phone. “Read quick. That really drains the battery.”

  It was an article from the Portland Press Herald, dated October 1932 and featuring an illustration of mushrooms and a few lines of explanation: glowing mushrooms were spreading like wildfire in northern Maine. The mushrooms in the drawings looked like the ones from the magazine except they weren’t in color.

  “Guess who drew the picture?” Mandy asked.

  “Max Bailey?”

  “Yeah. How did you know?”

  “I read his bio. I knew he was an illustrator for the newspaper.”

  “Well, now you know the mushrooms in that picture were real. They were in Maine, and they looked exactly like ours. But I couldn’t find one more word about them in the Portland paper archives. It was like they lost all interest. Somehow FDR getting elected president was more important.”

  “Maybe there was nothing more about them because there was nothing else to report?”

  “Max Bailey quit his job just after this illustration appeared. Something must have happened to him.”

  “His wife died.”

  “That happened years before he quit his job. Something might have happened here. He quit his job and moved so he could work on a story he never even published. Like he couldn’t even bring himself to write about it. It’s all connected. He saw something or discovered something that changed his life.”

  “Like a mushroom monster?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I don’t really see the point of all this,” I admitted. “Even if Max Bailey did see the exact same fungus and even if it did turn out to be a monster, how does that help us?”

  “I’m gathering facts,” she said. “Don’t you watch tape of other teams, Mr. Football? Look at the opponents’ statistics?”

  “We don’t do that in middle school,” I said. She had a point, though.

  “Well, that’s what I’m doing,” she said. “You can’t have a strategy if you don’t know what you’re up against.” She reached out for the phone. “You’re wasting the battery.”

  “Oh, yeah.” I gave it back and she put it to sleep. “Hey, can I ask you something else?”

  “I guess.”

  “So maybe you left Alden to save us all from the mushroom monster. But why did you get sent to Alden in the first place?”

  “First of all, I didn’t leave Alden to ‘save us all from the mushroom monster.’ I left to investigate a peculiar phenomenon. Second, Alden is an exclusive boarding school. I got accepted at Alden because I’m an excellent student.”

  “Ha.”

  “Ha yourself. Academically, it’s top-notch.”

  “Maybe it is, but everybody around here says it’s for girls … well, girls who are in some kind of trouble.” Mom never said so, but I’d heard guys at school making jokes about it. It wasn’t a reform school, but I knew it was really strict for a reason.

  “It depends on what you mean by ‘trouble,’ ” she said. “Some of the girls were just dating boys their parents didn’t like. Or they dyed their hair pink and got a nose ring. It’s only trouble because their parents didn’t like it.”

  “So your parents didn’t like your boyfriend?” Her hair was normal and she didn’t have any piercings, so I guessed that was it.

  “I’ve never had one, so no.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “What makes you so sure I did something?”

  “Because you’re there. And you ran away instead of just telling your parents you hate it there, which makes me think they won’t let you go home.”

  “Fine. I’ll tell you what I did. I wrote a story. Huge crime, right?”

  “You mean, like, fiction? A made-up story?”

  “A made-up story called ‘The Undead School.’ ”

  “What happened?”

  “It was about how everybody at my school turned into a zombie, right? It’s not going to win horror novel of the year, but it was okay. I posted it on the Internet as a blog. I put up a new chapter every few days. Some people even said they liked it, but some girls totally freaked out, and there was a big drama at the school.”

  “Drama?” I wasn’t following her at all. What was the big deal about w
riting a story about zombies? Stephen King did a book about zombies, and he was the most famous writer in the state. Dad had a lot of his books.

  “It was completely stupid,” she said. “They said it was threatening. Even though I made up the names. Like Esmé Myer became I. Mimi Mine. And Ashlee Grant became Ain’t She Grand. I changed names to protect the not-so-innocent, and it’s not my fault people knew who I was talking about.”

  “Oh.” I was starting to get it.

  “The hero is this girl named Mary Killer,” she continued. “She knows kung fu and stuff. She takes out the zombies one by one.”

  “And Mary is based on you?”

  “Sort of, yeah. I mean, it’s not a memoir or anything.…”

  “So you posted stories on the Internet about you killing other kids.”

  “They were zombies,” she said with a sniff. “What was I supposed to do?”

  “I don’t know.” I mulled it over for a while. I could see other kids freaking out. I could especially see their parents freaking out.

  “Not you, too!” she said.

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “You don’t have to. I see the look on your face. It’s the same way my dad looked when he found out I was expelled.”

  “They expelled you for that?”

  “Yep. Because I quote-unquote threatened other students. Zero tolerance for that at my school.” I saw a tear roll along her nose. She took one of the pizza napkins and dabbed at her face. “This is greasy,” she said, looking at the dirty napkin.

  I gave her one of my unused napkins, and she wiped the grease and tears off her face.

  “Where am I going to sleep tonight?” she asked. “I’m practically homeless.”

  “You could go back to Alden and … man up?” I said, using Coach words and wishing I hadn’t.

  “You want me to turn myself in?”

  “Yeah.” It would also send my dad back to Boston, but I was beginning to think it would be best for Mandy not to be practically homeless. I wouldn’t tell on her, now that we were friends, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t nudge her to turn herself in.

  “I can’t,” she said. “I hate that place so much.”

  “It can’t be that bad. It’s not like they can … cane you, or whatever.”

  “No, but Mrs. Bearish will take my phone, and they’ll stick me in the RC, and then I won’t even have access to the outside world. That’s torture for me. Disconnecting somebody from everything. I don’t have any friends there, and it gets lonely.”

  I was going to ask what an RC was, but the question got shoved aside. “Mrs. Bearish?”

  “This great big bear of a woman at the school.”

  “I think you mean Parrish. That’s my mom.”

  “Really?” She looked at me. “Oh, yeah. Your name is on your uniform. E. Parrish.”

  “That’s me.”

  “We call her that because she’s like our Mama Bear, you know? Looking out for everyone?” She saw I wasn’t buying it. “I’m sorry. Girls are snarky and awful.”

  “Forget it.”

  “Okay, I am too, obviously,” she said. “I didn’t mean anything when I wrote that story. It seemed funny while I was writing it. I didn’t think it would actually scare anyone.” She sighed. “So I guess I can’t spend the night at your house?”

  “Ha. You definitely don’t want that. Mrs. Bearish will be there.” I thought hard. “Maybe we can figure something else out.”

  “Oh, I’ll be all right,” she said. “There are some empty houses around. There’s usually a key under the garden gnome.”

  “Wait, I got it.” I snapped my fingers. “It wouldn’t exactly be breaking and entering.”

  “What are you supposed to be?” the guy at the front door of the haunted house asked me.

  “Huh?”

  “She’s a football player. I figured you were in a costume too. It’s half price if you are.”

  Mandy was wearing my uniform over her street clothes, the helmet hiding her face.

  “Here.” Mandy reached through the face mask on the helmet to take off her Harry Potter glasses and put them on me. Everything went blurry. “I’m a jock, and he’s a nerd.”

  The guy gave us a thumbs-up and the discount.

  Mandy took her glasses back as soon as we were in so both of us could actually see. We stopped to look at the three bears eating Goldilocks.

  “Truly horrible,” Mandy said with a shudder.

  “They really want to scare people,” I told her.

  “Or at least gross us out,” she said. I felt proud of Tanglewood for having a good enough haunted house to even gross out a big horror fan like Mandy. We went past the bears and the headless horseman.

  “What’s this?” Mandy asked when we got to the WELCOME TO KEATSTON sign.

  “It was the town that was here before Tanglewood, back in colonial days. It disappeared in seventeen-something.”

  Another group of people came by. I nudged Mandy out of the way so they could see.

  “Lame,” one of them said as they passed. They were obviously from out of town and didn’t know the story behind it.

  “The whole town disappeared?” Mandy asked in a whisper.

  “Yeah, and so will we.” I slipped through the curtain, and Mandy followed.

  “What the heck?” She was stunned to find another room hidden by the curtains. I knew the room was here because I’d sat in here and watched films or listened to some old guy talk about artifacts half a dozen times.

  “This is the old Keatston Meetinghouse,” I explained. “The big part is where they had meetings—that’s what they called church—and this is where the preacher guy lived. It’s the only building that survived.”

  “Were they Puritans?” Mandy asked.

  “It was later than that, but they acted like Puritans,” I told her, remembering one of my school visits. “There was like a Puritan revival.”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said. “We learned about that in history.”

  The room was crammed full of all the museum cases that were usually on display: table-sized clear plastic boxes full of old stuff. We squeezed between two cases, me trying to suck in my gut so I could fit. We finally found a padded bench where we could sit down. We sat with our backs to the cases and our feet on the wall.

  “I figured you could hang out here,” I told her. “I didn’t think about it being crammed full of stuff.”

  “It’s that much easier to hide,” she said. She swiveled around to look at the cases. “I’m going to live in a museum, just like Claudia Kincaid.”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind. So what did you mean when you said everyone disappeared?”

  I told her about the fire with no ashes, the people of Keatston vanishing off the face of the earth.

  “This was the only building left standing, and they never found bodies or graves or anything. They did find people’s belongings. That’s what’s in all those cases: dishes and clothes, some letters, stuff like that. It’s sad to see it.”

  There was a battered gray leather ball, now flat and torn and shriveled up like a raisin. The tour guide would point it out: “Whoever made that ball must have kept it hidden, because the town fathers would not have approved of such games.” I always wondered what kind of secret sports those kids played. There were other taboo items in the cases—a tiny chess set and a pack of playing cards, a paintbrush with its bristles long gone, and a disintegrating copy of Gulliver’s Travels. I thought mostly about the ball, because I couldn’t have lived without some kind of sports. I wouldn’t have been able to be me.

  “It’s sad to see it,” I repeated.

  “Hm,” she said. She grabbed her phone, maybe to see what the Internet knew about Keatston. I was sitting in an uncomfortable position, but the room was dark and peaceful. I closed my eyes and dozed off for a while.

  I woke up cramped and sore. I wondered what time it was, and whether or not Mom or Dad had started calling all of my frie
nds to find me.

  Mandy was gone. I felt around and found my sports bag. She’d put my uniform and pads back into it and set the helmet right next to it. Had she made another escape? No, her backpack was sitting right next to my stuff.

  I turned and tried to make out anything in the darkness. I saw a faint light bobbing near the doorway and felt my way there, scraping and gouging myself against several museum cases on the way.

  “Mandy?”

  “Yeah. Look at this.” She had her phone turned back on flashlight mode, the light dimmer than it was earlier. The battery was probably on its last gasp.

  “What time is it?” I asked her.

  “It’s only nine-thirty. They shut down half an hour ago. Look.” She directed the faint flashlight beam at something on the wall.

  It was the famous picture of Keatston, showing the town swallowed up by fire. It’s kind of cartoonish but not comical. In fact, I bet the picture gave every kid who ever saw it nightmares: rings of red and blue flames radiate from the Meetinghouse, the colors faded over time but still visible. Everything else is uncolored—the square rustic buildings consumed by the blaze, the tiny people with their arms waving and their mouths little O’s of fright. The Meetinghouse itself is at the center of the inferno but untouched by fire. There’s a window at the side and a boy looking out, his eyes wide. He isn’t screaming but he looks scared. It’s the same window we were just sitting under.

  “Who drew it?” she asked.

  “Nobody knows, and it’s not exactly a drawing.” I told her what I remembered from the tours—that the picture was a block print, meaning the artist did it backward in wood, cutting away everything but the lines to make a giant stamp. He’d coated the stamp with ink and pressed it on the paper, then colored in the fire with watercolors handmade from berries. Maybe he’d used the brush that was now lying in one of the cases.

  “You know, those don’t look like flames,” she said. “They look like mushroom caps.”

  I looked again, and sure, they did look like the conical mushroom caps, but they also looked like soft-serve ice cream or gnome hats, depending on how you looked at them. It probably wasn’t easy to carve super-realistic-looking fire.